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The Penguin Book of... (Penguin Classics)
New Penguin Book of English Verse
This is the first Penguin book of English poetry since John Heywood's edition in the 1950s. A revelatory new anthology of English verse, poems are ordered by date of composition rather than in monolithic slabs devoted to individual poets. Original spelling is used. There is a high proportion of anonymous poetry and also verse written on surfaces other than paper (inscriptions etc.). It gives a more comprehensive view of English verse in showing poems talking to each other. What is more, it is the first anthology of its scope to treat the 20th century in similar depth to earlier centuries.
1184 pages, Hardcover
First published October 26, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
September 21, 2021
"In a world like a picture, a world without language, would your mind go astray, lost among objects?"
-Iain Crichton Smith
I've been leafing through this for at least three years now after I bought a raggedy copy from my local library but only in the past year did I find enough focus to delve deep into such a serious looking anthology of poetry.
It was pleasant and encouraging to see Maiden in the Mor Lay
on the very first page, but that was only the tasting as this is no ordinary anthology of poems.
Ordinarily, any modern anthology is arranged historically, poet by poet, by dates of birth or alphabet. This anthology is arranged poem by poem rather than poet, each poem in a sequence according to the publishing date. In other words, poems are placed in the moment when they became known to the public. This makes more sense to this reader than any other arrangement.
It is quite captivating, poems by same author are usually dispersed through the volume and poems by different authors follow upon each other. The theme of the volume is Chronology, this was constructed with much hindsight, there is space for analysis of the much different poetic landscape of 1812 versus a more modern one from the 1960s.
If the intention of the volume is to restore poems to their places in the history of reading, then this reader declares it a complete success. One reads Plath alongside the poems that Plath herself was reading when her poems that one reads here were published. One understands who Robert Browning's day-to-day competition was, one can appreciate how very contemporary Hardy and Hulme really were, and the Great Vowel Shift is as noticeable as daylight in these pages.
I've discovered some new voices in Sir John Davies (among the first to drop the medieval E from the end of nouns), Robert Herrick (Hesperides), William Cowper (The Snail), Laetitia Elizabeth Landon (Lines of Life), Iain Crichton (Shall Gaelic Die?), Eilean Ni Chuilleanain (Swinehead), Eavan Boland (Self Portrait in the Summer Evening).
I leave you with the sixth stanza of Iain Crichton's `Shall Gaelic Die?':
"I came with a 'sobhrach' in my mouth. He came with a 'primrose'.
A 'primrose by the river's brim.' Between the two languages, the word 'sobhrach' turned to 'primrose'.
Behind the two words, a Roman said 'prima rosa'.
The 'sobhrach' or the 'primrose' was in our hands. Its reasons belonged to us."
-Iain Crichton Smith
I've been leafing through this for at least three years now after I bought a raggedy copy from my local library but only in the past year did I find enough focus to delve deep into such a serious looking anthology of poetry.
It was pleasant and encouraging to see Maiden in the Mor Lay
on the very first page, but that was only the tasting as this is no ordinary anthology of poems.
Ordinarily, any modern anthology is arranged historically, poet by poet, by dates of birth or alphabet. This anthology is arranged poem by poem rather than poet, each poem in a sequence according to the publishing date. In other words, poems are placed in the moment when they became known to the public. This makes more sense to this reader than any other arrangement.
It is quite captivating, poems by same author are usually dispersed through the volume and poems by different authors follow upon each other. The theme of the volume is Chronology, this was constructed with much hindsight, there is space for analysis of the much different poetic landscape of 1812 versus a more modern one from the 1960s.
If the intention of the volume is to restore poems to their places in the history of reading, then this reader declares it a complete success. One reads Plath alongside the poems that Plath herself was reading when her poems that one reads here were published. One understands who Robert Browning's day-to-day competition was, one can appreciate how very contemporary Hardy and Hulme really were, and the Great Vowel Shift is as noticeable as daylight in these pages.
I've discovered some new voices in Sir John Davies (among the first to drop the medieval E from the end of nouns), Robert Herrick (Hesperides), William Cowper (The Snail), Laetitia Elizabeth Landon (Lines of Life), Iain Crichton (Shall Gaelic Die?), Eilean Ni Chuilleanain (Swinehead), Eavan Boland (Self Portrait in the Summer Evening).
I leave you with the sixth stanza of Iain Crichton's `Shall Gaelic Die?':
"I came with a 'sobhrach' in my mouth. He came with a 'primrose'.
A 'primrose by the river's brim.' Between the two languages, the word 'sobhrach' turned to 'primrose'.
Behind the two words, a Roman said 'prima rosa'.
The 'sobhrach' or the 'primrose' was in our hands. Its reasons belonged to us."
April 5, 2020
This anthology tracks English poetry from its genesis to the 1990’s. Rather than presenting the poets in their chronological march you are given the selected poems in their chronological order. Initially, I found this a bit confusing, which reflects as much on me as the text.
If I wanted to study, for example, the poems of Keats, then I would necessarily bump up against his contemporaries. Strange. On reflection, however, the presented poems appear when they originally appeared. Thus, the reader gets a rich blend of the Romantics as the poems of the time lined up with their contemporaries rather than being separated by the author. After shedding my bias of always reading anthologies by author I started to enjoy dipping in and out of a decade of poems by a variety of poets. Sure, I needed at times to go to the index to find a poem rather than simply flipping through all the poet’s work, but let's face it, great poetry is worth looking for any time.
Enjoy this anthology.
If I wanted to study, for example, the poems of Keats, then I would necessarily bump up against his contemporaries. Strange. On reflection, however, the presented poems appear when they originally appeared. Thus, the reader gets a rich blend of the Romantics as the poems of the time lined up with their contemporaries rather than being separated by the author. After shedding my bias of always reading anthologies by author I started to enjoy dipping in and out of a decade of poems by a variety of poets. Sure, I needed at times to go to the index to find a poem rather than simply flipping through all the poet’s work, but let's face it, great poetry is worth looking for any time.
Enjoy this anthology.
October 27, 2021
"Fall leaves fall die flowers away
Lengthen night and shorten day
Every leaf speaks bliss to me
Fluttering from the autumn tree
I shall smile when wreaths of snow
Blossom where the rose should grow
I shall sing when night’s decay
Ushers in a drearier day"
-Emily Bronte
The Sensitive Plant, Percy Bysshe Shelly
"Whether the Sensitive-plant, or that
Which within its boughs like a spirit sat
Ere its outward form had known decay,
Now felt this change, – I cannot say.
Whether that Lady’s gentle mind,
No longer with the form combined
Which scattered love – as stars do light,
Found sadness, where it left delight,
I dare not guess; but in this life
Of error, ignorance and strife –
Where nothing is – but all things seem,
And we the shadows of the dream,
It is a modest creed, and yet
Pleasant if one considers it,
To own that death itself must be,
Like all the rest, – a mockery.
That garden sweet, that lady fair
And all sweet shapes and odours there
In truth have never past away –
’Tis we, ’tis ours, are changed – not they.
For love, and beauty, and delight
There is no death nor change: their might
Exceeds our organs – which endure
No light – being themselves obscure."
August 19, 2015
This weighty tome was part of an amazing poetics class taught by Saskia Hamilton. We only dipped into it for the class, but I've picked it back up in order to learn different music for my own peculiar writing. I am reading it backwards so as to avoid Chaucer as long as possible.
December 26, 2022
A wonderful anthology. A book to dip into and savour throughout one’s life.
May 26, 2024
The New Penguin Book of English Verse does everything that an (almost) comprehensive anthology ought to do, although not in a terribly imaginative manner. The poems are arranged by date of writing, taking us from Anglo-Saxon poetry through to 1994. Reading it, over a course of years, as I have done, means getting stuck for long periods of not terribly interesting poetry. Dryden and Pope have not aged well - in contrast the Cavalier poets before them and the Romantics after them still get the juices flowing (though not, for me at least, Byron).
The question might be asked as to the point of these large anthologies in the Twenty First Century. This book was published in 2000, just as the internet was gathering steam. For people like me (in my 20s when I acquired it) the thought of searching for poetry on the internet was only just gaining traction. Yet even today Penguin still produces this doorstoppers - elegies and classical poetry both being the subject of recent anthologies.
One answer is obviously that of discovering something new. There were many poems, inevitably, that I hadn't come across before. John Dyer's My Ox Duke (1735) was entirely unknown to me and I found very charming. A re-reading of some of Auden's poetry also allowed me to reappraise a little my less than impressed attitude towards him. Then there are the discoveries of the old favourites - Gray's Elegy, Keats' 1819 odes and splashes of Larkin (but no Aubade!) - which you read again and again. Of course this assumes that someone is going to read the book from cover to cover. Those who dip in and out are likely to land on their favourites in any case.
And what of the title "Book of English verse"? This is of course problematic for any such anthology. It clearly is not simply "English" verse: Dylan Thomas, Robert Burns, W.B. Yeats speak against that. Nor is it simply verse written in English. There are no American poets, for instance (T.S. Eliot excepted). It is not even poetry written entirely in English Sorley MacClean and one or two others wrote in Gaelic and are translated. Why then could it not be termed "British" or "British and Irish" poetry? Would the title be different today, I wonder?
Finally, in a book this size there are bound to be the odd typos but it is a bit frustrating in poetry when the smallest error can change a meaning: even a full stop instead of a comma. So it was a bit annoying to discover cavalry instead of calvary, the odd misplaced letter and errant punctuation.
The question might be asked as to the point of these large anthologies in the Twenty First Century. This book was published in 2000, just as the internet was gathering steam. For people like me (in my 20s when I acquired it) the thought of searching for poetry on the internet was only just gaining traction. Yet even today Penguin still produces this doorstoppers - elegies and classical poetry both being the subject of recent anthologies.
One answer is obviously that of discovering something new. There were many poems, inevitably, that I hadn't come across before. John Dyer's My Ox Duke (1735) was entirely unknown to me and I found very charming. A re-reading of some of Auden's poetry also allowed me to reappraise a little my less than impressed attitude towards him. Then there are the discoveries of the old favourites - Gray's Elegy, Keats' 1819 odes and splashes of Larkin (but no Aubade!) - which you read again and again. Of course this assumes that someone is going to read the book from cover to cover. Those who dip in and out are likely to land on their favourites in any case.
And what of the title "Book of English verse"? This is of course problematic for any such anthology. It clearly is not simply "English" verse: Dylan Thomas, Robert Burns, W.B. Yeats speak against that. Nor is it simply verse written in English. There are no American poets, for instance (T.S. Eliot excepted). It is not even poetry written entirely in English Sorley MacClean and one or two others wrote in Gaelic and are translated. Why then could it not be termed "British" or "British and Irish" poetry? Would the title be different today, I wonder?
Finally, in a book this size there are bound to be the odd typos but it is a bit frustrating in poetry when the smallest error can change a meaning: even a full stop instead of a comma. So it was a bit annoying to discover cavalry instead of calvary, the odd misplaced letter and errant punctuation.
February 5, 2018
Easily the best collection of English verse I've come across. The chronological arrangement is ideal for those historically or tradition minded. I will be dipping in and out of it now that I am finished, probably until it falls apart. Would highly recommend.
Read
August 31, 2022It's imperative, I find, for budding poets (English-speaking poets, at least) to own one of these. It saves them from the hubris of believing that all of their individual vagaries are justified in the face of the English canon.
April 3, 2020
I honestly think it is impossible to complete this anthology fully, and poetry is something you have to come back to enjoy the variety of its contents continually.
September 20, 2017
Poems read:
Anonymous, ‘Sir Patrick Spence’
Anonymous, ‘Edward, Edward’
Anonymous, ‘Lord Thomas and Fair Annet’
Anonymous, ‘The Wife of Usher’s Well’
Anonymous, ‘The Twa Corbies’
Anonymous, ‘Thomas the Rhymer’
John Keats, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci. A Ballad’
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, in Seven Parts’
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’
Anonymous, ‘Lord Randal’
Shakespeare: from Love’s Labour’s Lost
Philip Larkin, ‘This Be the Verse’
Chidiock Tichborne, ‘My prime of youth is but a froste of cares’
R.S. Thomas, ‘Pietà’
Hugh MacDiarmid, ‘Empty Vessel’
Sir Thomas Wyatt, ‘They fle from me that sometyme did me seke’
Sir Thomas Wyatt/Petrarch, ‘Who so list to hount I knowe where is an hynde’
Mark Alexander Boyd, ‘Sonet’
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, ‘Alas, so all thinges nowe doe holde their peace’
Sir Philip Sidney, ‘With how sad steps, ô Moone, thou climb’st the skies’
William Shakespeare, ‘That time of yeeare thou maist in me behold’
George Herbert, ‘Prayer’
John Milton, ‘On the Late Massacher in Piemont’
William Wordsworth, ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge’
Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘The Windhover’
Wilfred Owen, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’
W. B. Yeats, ‘Leda and the Swan’
Patrick Kavanagh, ‘The Hospital’
Paul Muldoon, ‘Why Brownlee Left’
Tony Harrison, ‘Continuous’
Anonymous, ‘Sir Patrick Spence’
Anonymous, ‘Edward, Edward’
Anonymous, ‘Lord Thomas and Fair Annet’
Anonymous, ‘The Wife of Usher’s Well’
Anonymous, ‘The Twa Corbies’
Anonymous, ‘Thomas the Rhymer’
John Keats, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci. A Ballad’
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, in Seven Parts’
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’
Anonymous, ‘Lord Randal’
Shakespeare: from Love’s Labour’s Lost
Philip Larkin, ‘This Be the Verse’
Chidiock Tichborne, ‘My prime of youth is but a froste of cares’
R.S. Thomas, ‘Pietà’
Hugh MacDiarmid, ‘Empty Vessel’
Sir Thomas Wyatt, ‘They fle from me that sometyme did me seke’
Sir Thomas Wyatt/Petrarch, ‘Who so list to hount I knowe where is an hynde’
Mark Alexander Boyd, ‘Sonet’
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, ‘Alas, so all thinges nowe doe holde their peace’
Sir Philip Sidney, ‘With how sad steps, ô Moone, thou climb’st the skies’
William Shakespeare, ‘That time of yeeare thou maist in me behold’
George Herbert, ‘Prayer’
John Milton, ‘On the Late Massacher in Piemont’
William Wordsworth, ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge’
Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘The Windhover’
Wilfred Owen, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’
W. B. Yeats, ‘Leda and the Swan’
Patrick Kavanagh, ‘The Hospital’
Paul Muldoon, ‘Why Brownlee Left’
Tony Harrison, ‘Continuous’
February 7, 2016
I don't have a lot of poetry anthologies, and this is the only one I have taken with me to school. The reason is it has a little bit of everything. It is arranged chronologically (from the 1300s to mid-1900s), which is unusual and interesting to me because history. You can pick any era to read from. All the big names are there, with some unusual selections thereof as well as the more expected ones. And there are also some quirky and amusing gems, such as the 1920 lines "It is a fearsome thing to be the Pope/that cross will not fall on me I hope" and the 17th century "Oh, thou wretched cock with thy perpetual noise/mayst thou be capon made and lose thy voice," evidence that early mornings have always been difficult. Also in this anthology are a collection of witty or just poetic epitaphs (my favorites are for Isaac Newton by Alexander Pope "--Then God said 'Let Newton Be,' and all was light" and the one for Pope himself "--poetry is dead"). The entirety of the 1570 "New Ballad Greensleeves, sung to the new tune Greensleeves" is also to be found in this tome.
It is a delight. As there is no theme, there is poetry for any mood. It is, in all, a uniquely excellent collection.
It is a delight. As there is no theme, there is poetry for any mood. It is, in all, a uniquely excellent collection.
September 22, 2010
It's so easy to criticize anthologies. For what they left out. For what they included. For what they emphasized or didn't emphasize enough. All that aside: I found this book in Mexico City's best English-language bookstore, at a time in my life when I was starved for English words. It nourished me. Still does.
October 15, 2007
Hey it's poetry collection! So it's 5 stars!
February 4, 2008
The best general anthology of poetry in English ever published.
Read
January 17, 2016Blah. I hate anthologies that are so bereft of annotations. This is an okay resource if Wikipedia is your best friend. Complaints aside, it's at least a fairly comprehensive chronological selection.
March 9, 2022
The Penguin Book of English Verse contains poems that are quite diverse.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews